Posted
by
michael
on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @11:57AM
from the neuromancer dept.

Joe Barr writes "NewsForge [ed. note: part of OSTG along with Slashdot] is running its concluding piece on the week-long Blackhat/DEFCON hackerfest in Las Vegas. Want to know how little our police/intelligence agencies seem to have learned from their failures prior to 9/11? Or how a very large goon known only as Priest prevented outright political violence at a DEFCON presentation on Civil Disobedience? Or which of the two conferences is right for you? It's all here in the Blackhat/Defcon: Final report." Reader M. Curphey writes "The Web Application Security Consortium (WASC) announced at Blackhat the release of a 'Threat Classifications' document. This document attempts to clarify web security terminology such as Cross Site Scripting, Session Fixation, Cookie poisoning, and HTTP response splitting (to name a few)."

There have been a high number of occurances of 503's since the zero-notice updates a few weeks ago. (at the same time, all web pages started returning "no-cache" so simple brower navigation is forced to redownload every byte on every mouse click. When I logged a bug about this, it was immediately dismissed without comment.)

Geez, thanks for spoiling it for the rest of us.
Do you have ANY idea how hard it is to build a Lamborghini by mail ordering all the parts to different addresses from different Lamborghini dealers' repair shops?
I'm still missing the front hood, the bumpers, and the electrical system...
(It's FUNNY, SMILE!)

Suppose:1. you trust some website to be secure with the credit card info you send to them.2. disgruntled employee dumps list of customers' info into plaintext file upon firing, then copies and pastes it all over the web.

Also, I think some of those pages are old, stale lists of previously compromised cards compiled by the people that did the compromising.

The 503 errors were not just with Firefox. I was getting the same error while being logged in on either Firefox or IE. Only if I cleared my cookies and loaded the page would I be allowed to get past the 503.

I have been thinking of going to defcon for the last lil while, and maybe will be able to next year. The trip would also need to include my g/f, she knows a bit about computers, but not a whole lot. In your opinion, would there be enough for her to do there, or should she venture other places?

I have been thinking of going to defcon for the last lil while, and maybe will be able to next year. The trip would also need to include my g/f, she knows a bit about computers, but not a whole lot. In your opinion, would there be enough for her to do there, or should she venture other places?

First off, there are females at DefCon, and not all of them are there, because they think it's an easy place to pick up guys.

That said, have her look at the program and see if any of the talks are interesting to her. If she knows only a bit, maybe the technical talks won't be that interesting, but the talks that delve into the overlap between politics and technology might be of interest. I'm guessing if she's not that into it, the contests wouldn't be very fun to her.

If it's not her thing at all, have her look and see if Vegas is something interesting to her, and she can join you later. But, I'd be more inclined to say, if it's not her thing, plan a different trip that both of you would enjoy before or after DefCon.

I've attended the past 7 defcons, and I'm starting to feel like it's losing its magic. The first defcon I went to (defcon 3) had a crowd that was much more focused on doing meaningful hacking (some ethical, some otherwise) in the field...it seems like now it's a bunch of 20 year olds who think they're hackers because they know how to reprogram their mac address on their linux labtop.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but it feels like the good old days are passing me by.

Want to know how little our police/intelligence agencies seem to have learned from their failures prior to 9/11?

I'm afraid we don't need Black Hat/Defcon to tell us this. Just yesterday we had major terrorism alerts about specific targets and today we find out the information was all years old. Does that mean the buildings weren't targets still? Well seeing as some of the info went back prior to 9/11 it would make it seem a fairly safe bet that the seriousness of the threat was vastly overstated.

So we know what they haven't learned quite well and many of us keep hoping they'll stop crying wolf without good reason. It's only so long till most Americans start ignoring the terror alerts as things now stand, something that would be very bad.

I'm sure there were plenty of more interesting things at Black Hat/Defcon though.:)

I think all that means is that the terrorists are going on scouting missions. IOW, scout possible targets, determine some facts about them, etc. It's the same thing militaries have done for centuries: figure out what to attack and what impact it might have.

The question is whether the targets scouted are still considered relevant by the terrorists. This is the type of stuff intelligence services need to find out, and in a timely manner. And if it is s

Well sure it could, but crashing a cropduster into a Waffle House isn't going to have the same kind of effect.

That's a debatable point, actually, and I think you're being a bit of a bigot (and this is from a guy who sometimes wishes much of the "South" would slip off into another dimension).

If I were a terrorist, I'd be looking for the *least* likely targets. I might even just throw a dart at a map. One of the aspects of terror is to, well, terrorize, and an implementation of random "can happen anywhere

but crashing a cropduster into a Waffle House isn't going to have the same kind of effect.

As if GA lives have less value than NYC lives? C'mon. And I live in DC, fwiw. btw: we were hit too. Why is that always forgotten by New Yorkers?

And if you think it'd have less impact, riddle me this: what would happen to the US Economy if a crop duster flew into the Mall of America a week before Black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving Day; the busiest retail shopping day of the year).

Hmmm, I see that you lack appreciation of scale (i.e. That you compare the number of people who can fit into a waffle house, 30, with the number of people who died in the twin towers, 3000+), and that you confuse the Waffle House with one of the largest malls in the world.

First of all, I agree with you vis a vis the mall of america. It's a good target. Which is my point: for terrorism to occur and be effective, there must be a GOOD TARGET.

I think the big thing that the government did just learn is that the president can stand on TV and announce the creation of an "intelligence czar" and not one damned person in the room will jump up and say "So what in the name of the sweet baby Jebuz is Tom frigging Ridge, then? Huh?"
That scares me more than the Al Quaedas, kids.

I think the big thing that the government did just learn is that the president can stand on TV and announce the creation of an "intelligence czar" and not one damned person in the room will jump up and say "So what in the name of the sweet baby Jebuz is Tom frigging Ridge, then? Huh?" That scares me more than the Al Quaedas, kids.

Well I didn't jump up and say it but I've been wondering myself why we need one, as you point out, what's Tom Ridge for? I thought he, and his new department of Homeland Secu

Well I didn't jump up and say it but I've been wondering myself why we need one, as you point out, what's Tom Ridge for? I thought he, and his new department of Homeland Security, were supposed to at least coordinate info from various agencies.

Putting aside the question of whether either position is a good idea, I don't quite get what you guys are so puzzled about. Homeland Security is supposed to maintain domestic security operations and, as you say, filter relevant intelligence info. It's not supposed to

My next big question is about why we keep announcing "czars" of any kind. Considering the overwhelming success of the drug czar and his friends, it seems we'd have moved on to queens or overlords or all-seeing grand poobahs by now.

There's no such timing information. While they do expect some attack before the elections, that's unrelated to the current information. Which has been determined to have been largely generated pre-9/11 in any event. Read: this was an over-reaction to worthless intel; they were all excited about it because of it's specificity, but it's stale stale. The reconnaissance info that they acquired had no timing information included.

In fact, it made me think of the "intel" that Princess Leia gave to Darth ri

...it's easier to know how to break into a system/box/whatever, than it is to learn exactly what happened and take measures to prevent it.

Sure, some items are fairly obvious, but I'm willing to wager that there are a lot of exploits that even dedicated security officials aren't aware of, simply because the exploit was found and put to use, but never reported.

As it applies to 9/11, I'm fairly certain that OBL and his boys are more willing to shell out the cash for the folks who can find undiscovered vulns than for scripters who get their rocks off by passing around " 'sploits".

Given this, I doubt there is too awful much one can learn about securing the network completely against future attacks.

An arsonist just pours some gas and lights a match. That's more like what a script kiddie does. They just throw some exploits at random machines and try to install subseven. Obviously they don't know jack about security. A skilled hacker is more like an experienced thief. They use complex techiques to avoid detection, make surgical strikes at predetermined targets, and learn about their targets' security measures to more effectively neutralize them. Those people make good security experts.

One real security problem is that the complexity of attacks is increased, but the difficulty of launching them has decreased. The more skilled hackers create scripts or point-and-click tools, and the script kiddies can use them without having to know much about what they're doing. One book had a transcript of a conversation from an irc hacking channel, and some of the "hackers" seemed to be lacking in basic knowledge. For example, one of them wasn't too sure how to mount a second hard drive in Linux.

Yep, they're zero-day exploits, but I was thinking of folks who, instead of holding it in their back pocket, offer the use of that vulnerability for sale... and for a lot more cash than the MSRP of a new video card.

In Mozilla's case, it would be possible to track an exploit and write your own patch, thanks to F/OSS.

Open source brings up another point - how can an agency prepare for an attack, even knowing how they'll get attacked, if the OS/proggie vendor hasn't a patch out for it yet...

Questions were asked about what "going over the line" meant. Assclowns like Crimethinc are exactly what you'd want to point at and say "that's what I'm talking about." Disagreeing with the government (or even just Republicans) is one thing, but going around encouraging people to vandalize websites/etc is something else.

Seriously. I thought maybe I'd missed some important announcement, but I can't find anything. What's the deal? I thought I heard at one point that it was caused by RSS load, but I haven't heard any more on that subject.

Oddly enough, the links in the RSS feed are the only way I've been making it to Slashdot lately. For some reason, I only have a problem getting to the main page, but individual story pages are fine. The RSS feeds lets me go straight to the story feed.

Well, I'm sure that no one wants to admit it, but I know the truth about why there have been so many 503 errors recently. CmdrTaco and friends are trying to get their machines ready to run Doom 3, and realizing that they need more horsepower in their gaming machines, have been taking parts from the servers that host Slashdot.

Unfortunately, we will likely have these errors for quite a while, because now that they all have machines capable of running Doom 3, and since Doom 3 is now out (and undoubtedly in CmrdTaco and friend's hands), they'll be far too busy with that to even remember than they run a website.

The recommended way to deal with this is to go out and purchase Doom 3 yourself. It won't bring Slashdot back, but you'll be too busy fighting demons to care.

Just use the RXX feeds: http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf [slashdot.org] or http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rss [slashdot.org]. Both are statically generated, and thus don't Perl out. Moreover, you can copy/paste the comments.pl URL without getting 503s. I'd noticed my hourly curl|grep|sed feed was working without problem, so I suspected the RXX feeds were working though index.pl wasn't.

from the article:Christy had mentioned that one of the things they were doing at Defcon was recruiting. He went on to tell the crowd that if they were interested, and "had not gone over the line," to talk to him afterwards. The "had not gone over the line" comment became one of the hottest topics during the Q&A.

It appears that the lessons the intelligence community has learned from 9/11 have not yet trickled all the way down through the federal bureaucracy -- particularly that bit about the failure of our intelligence pre-9/11 being primarily because of our loss of vital HUMINT owing to both budget and moral directives. When the CIA was told it could only use politically correct HUMINT operatives, it lost its most vital flow of intelligence.

Actually, I think the remark in question -- "had not gone over the line" -- meant no the criminal record, stable finances, etc. required of regular government employees who need clearances, like programmers and sys admins. IOW, they were looking for technical staffers for work at HQ.

The PC'ness at the CIA regarding HUMINT referred to who they could and couldn't hire as intelligence sources. E.g. (hypothetical examples here), several years ago, the CIA could hire a mid-level Iraqi military paper-pusher to smuggle out documents about what Saddam was up to, but at the same time couldn't hire a low-level al Qaeda operative to do the same because he's gone through terror training involving weapon experiments on animals. Even if the operative could give excrutiating details about the next terror strike (such as time/place/MO), he had done those evil experiments on animals, which somehow made him ineligible for the CIA payroll. (How such rules came into effect I dont know)

Whether or not US intelligence has changed this since 9/11 I dont know the answer. I do know that one such scenario I described above was something discussed at length by news orgs immediately after 9/11 as speculation for why the US intelligence failed. (IMO, there shouldn't be such silly restrictions on who the CIA can hire as sources. If the source gives good info, pay him for it to encourage more. If he don't, or the stuff he gives is turns out to be unreliable, stop paying him.)

But as for "going over the line" - for what the guy was looking for in personnel, he means things like ability to pee in a cup cleanly, unlike Ricky Williams, and not having a rap sheet.

I would agree with you in that the Feds are looking for those who are generally upstanding citizens who are not, and have not been, career criminals, before they filled out the application forms.

What they leave out the picture are grayer operations, where they do in fact work with criminals. But such actions are almost always intended to catch bigger fish and not to compromise the security of the country as a whole. Recall the American truck driver who was a foot soldier for al Qaeda. (This was in the l

"We got the call for trouble in the room. The gentleman, I was told, was preaching sedition. I knew that we had to take some steps quickly preventing that. Defcon is definitely for free speech, definitely for legal civil disobedience. But not anarchy, not psychopathic destruction of property. " [Emphasis mine]

Civil disobedience is, by definition, illegal. That's the whole point of it.

Are you a government-trained lawmaking expert, Mr. Rufus? No? Well then, I'm afraid you are not qualified to decide what the "whole point" of any law is.

I know I shouldn't feed the AC trolls, but I can't resist:

I did not make any comment on the "whole point" of any particular law. I commented on the whole point of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is not a law. It is the willful and public breaking (hence illegal) of an unjust law, in the hopes of receiving the corresponding punishment, as a means

How is it that the members of the most dovish American ideology when it comes to foreign policy always seem to be the ones for inciting violence against their domestic enemies? CrimeThinc (yes, I actually read the article) is just one of a long line stretching back to the Weatherman Underground and the SLA up to the Seattle WTO protestors smashing windows. Discounting lone nuts like Timothy McVee (and remember that the Oklahoma City bombing was universally condemned among conservatives), how is it that the half of America which owns guns is never the one calling for violence?

There are some anti-abortion groups (on the conservative end of the spectrum) which advocate violence, and also militia groups (some of which McVeigh had contact with) which also advocate violence. There have been numerous other right-wing groups in America which have used violence against their political enemies - in the sixties there were more than a couple anti-war protesters that got their heads bashed in with axe handles. Also don't forget the various Civil Rights workers in the south during the 50s/60s who were murdered by folks who were definitely on the right-wing end of the spectrum.

How is it that the members of the most dovish American ideology when it comes to foreign policy always seem to be the ones for inciting violence against their domestic enemies?

For the same reason that the radical right are always the ones who seem to be inciting violence against their domestic enemies. Tim McVee is hardly unique in his political stance and aspirations, nor have you cited anyone on the left that equals his level of destructiveness or intent (there are such people, but CrimeThinc is hardly of that caliber. He is not advocating mass murder).

The reality is that the so-called political spectrum is more of a sphere than a line. The extreme right and far left meet and become one and the same. Consider the similiarities of Stalin and Hitler, for example. Kids blowing up toilets to protest vietnam bear a striking similiarity to skinheads defacing jewish tombstones. Republican thugs terrorizing librarians and volunteers during the Florida recount bear a striking resemblence to communists in China enforcing campus-wide political correctness vis-a-vis the One True Party(tm) system.

Radicalism is radicalism, whether dressed in a Liberal Left or Reactionary Right attire, just as religious fundamentalism is religious fundamentalism irrespective of its Christian, Jewish, or Islamic trappings.

You have simply chosen to filter your perceptions through your own political dogma, as many people on both sides of the aisle often do. However, the reality is that folks of all radical stripes, in all political, religious, social, and philosophical directions, employ similiar methods to achieve their goals, those methods correlating much more strongly to their degree of radicalism and fanaticism than their particular social, political, religious, or philosophical bent.

If I had it to do over again, I would substitute zealotry for radicalism in the post above.

There are many people with radical notions (where radical = divergence from the society's mainstream assumptions) who are not at all fanatical and would never resort to violent means to achieve those changes (Richard Stallman is an example of someone who is radical and stubborn, but not zealous or fanatical in any real sense of the word... his detractor's rhetoric notwithstanding). Women's suffurage was at one time radical, but most of those persuing it were not fanatical and virtually everyone non-violent. This in contrast to those who fanatically defended the status quo and physically attacked and even murdered women for daring to insist on the same basic civil rights afforded the men of their day.

So, to recap: the reality is that folks of all fanatical stripes, in all political, religious, social, and philosophical directions, employ similiar methods to achieve their goals, those methods correlating much more strongly to their degree of zealotry and fanaticism than their political, social, relgiious, or phisophical bent, or their degree of divergence from the political "mainstream."

The reality is that the so-called political spectrum is more of a sphere than a line. The extreme right and far left meet and become one and the same.

This is extremely well said, and bears repeating. Extremists are always the ones most willing--even eager--to use violence to achieve their ends, no matter what those ends may be--and just because they're nominally "on your side" doesn't mean they merit support. Be it a nut blowing up an abortion clinic (I'm pro-life, and I still think they're nuts) or a

How is it that the members of the most dovish American ideology when it comes to foreign policy always seem to be the ones for inciting violence against their domestic enemies? CrimeThinc (yes, I actually read the article) is just one of a long line stretching back to the Weatherman Underground and the SLA up to the Seattle WTO protestors smashing windows. Discounting lone nuts like Timothy McVee (and remember that the Oklahoma City bombing was universally condemned among conservatives), how is it that the

DC12 was my first DefCon, my only two gripes were the heat (us northerners are wimps) and the chronic lack of seating. It seeed that by Saturday afternoon much of the crowds had subsided, but there were still issues nonetheless. I'll definitely be going back next year with a bigger group.

Possibly one of the highlights was getting pics of Woz and Mitnick standing a few feet apart from each other; with Woz on his Segway. Pretty cool.

Yes, I RTFA, and somehow I didn't see much about our intelligence agencies "not learning much since 9/11". I suppose the summary is referring to not hiring crackers that have done illegal stuff, but that's moronic -- if the NSA would reject someone for a job breaking into things BECAUSE they know how to break into things, we are all in big trouble.

I haven't been to Def Con in a couple of years. I went the first year they were at the Alexis Park, and it was OK. Went back the next year, and they'd clearly outgrown the venue. Wasn't able to get a seat for ANY of the talks.

I don't know if they've signed some sort of long-term contract, or maybe they've just gotten kicked out of everywhere else, but I'm not going back until they get a considerably larger place.

I would imagine that people by and large go to DefCon to learn HOW to do something not WHY. There appears to be a lot of faux anarcho posing going on as well as faux Fedcop speak in response.

Only another anarchist or Fedcop would ever think that what an anarchist or Fedcop has to say is remotely interesting. I can't imagine anyone at DefCon suddenly deciding that either breaking thinks is kewl or that diversity of opinion has to be tolerated. Nor would I think that the self professed Grey-Hats are going to come out in favor of the PATRIOT act.

When we all talk to a room full of people who are our clones it's got to get pretty boring.

In the article, there was a section discussing "Meet the Feds." From that section, I quote: "The Patriot Act was also called into question by attendees. The FBI representative asserted that just because the act had been passed didn't mean they had carte blanche to surveil anyone they wanted, that judges still had approve their requests. That reasoning only flew so far, however, as the questioner pointed out that such requests by the FBI are always approved, never denied."

What we tend to forget is that, even in the Judicial system, there is a check-and-balance--especially when it comes to warrants. While a judge may allow a warrant, if a case ever goes to trial then a jury has an opportunity to nullify the value of any evidence obtained via a warrant. I know that sounds a little naiive, but this is one purpose of the jury--injecting the People into the judicial process to protect an accused from the Government. The jury is the key point in the process that is not absolutely Government controlled.

However, the attendees brought issue with the fact that "judges always approve." There was a landmark case (granted, it was in the early 18th C. in England) that allowed a victim to bring suit. The victim in question owned a printing press that printed pamphlets hostile to the Crown (or was it Parliment?). The Government responded by obtaining an ill-gotten warrant to wield as a weapon to silence him. However, the man suied and won a substancial sum. I think the right words were something to the effect of "a suitably painfully high sum to deter the Government from pursuing that line of action again."

Anyway, I'd like to point out that there are recourses of action for virtually anybody mis-treated by a ill-gotten warrant that are built into our legal system. Even if the judge always approve, there is the jury to help shield, and the precedence to file suit when abused. (I'd also like to point out that this is a common tactic by those justly prosecuted to try to wear down the government by attrition.)

Did you read the same article I did? IN the article I read, the security showed up and sat next to him during his diatribe and only removed him AFTER one of the spectators appeared to be on the verge of violence toward the speaker(and this was during or after the Q&A portion of the presentation).

I was going to mod you down as flamebait, but then I reconsidered, mainly because you seem to be one of the few people that understand the Declaration of Independence: the government is the servant of the people, not the other way 'round.

Still, I wish people would quit focusing so exclusively on the evils of the current administration, and acting like John Kerry would be so much better. It's exactly the kind of thinking that got us W four years ago. Remember? Clinton was corrupt to the core, Gore was see

Maybe much of the country thought Clinton was corrupt - and what was it over? A blow job! Is this comparable to failing to justify war?

Also, don't forget how close that vote was. Gore won the popular vote. We're a divided country, "we" didn't really choose one way or the other.

The problem with 3rd party politics is that if you choose the party that best suits you, you may lose to a united enemy. If nader voters had voted gore, bush would have lost. Do you really want another 4 years of Bush? Maybe you don

Yes, I've seen what Bush has done, and I don't like almost all of it. And I don't think Kerry would be better; in fact, based on his senate voting record, I'm pretty sure he would be worse. I agree with your sentiment "let's give someone else a chance." Yes, indeed, how about a Libertarian or a Constitutionalist?

During the debate over the McCain-Feingold 1st Amendment Muzzling Act, one supporter said, "we've got to get the money out of politics." To which I respond: the only way to get the money out of po

I was going to mod you down as flamebait, but then I reconsidered, mainly because you seem to be one of the few people that understand the Declaration of Independence: the government is the servant of the people, not the other way 'round.

Still, I wish people would quit focusing so exclusively on the evils of the current administration, and acting like John Kerry would be so much better. It's exactly the kind of thinking that got us W four years ago. Remember? Clinton was corrupt to the core, Gore was seen

Our government is by no means "too corrupt and opressive". I'm a hippie, old but still, and I don't find our government such. I've seen it way worse, and so have many others. So, no, it's not anywhere near justifying "by any means".

"Who defines what's sedition?"

Not you, and here's why.

"...Republicats are guilty of treason..."
"...for misleading Americans into war..."
"...selling the country to the Chinese..."
"...passing the Patriot Act..."

Funny that you use the term "sedition", and then go on to express your outrage over the loss of liberty through the PATRIOT Act. If you want a classic example of an outrageously un-Constitutional law, do a little research on the Alien and Sedition Act. Far, far worse than the PATRIOT Act, and also flagrantly illegal. In fact, I'm finding a lot of similarities between how we conducted ourselves in the late 18th century and now.

Fortunately, the US population at that time had better sense than to become milit

And the jury is still out on the "misleading Americans into war" and the evidence currently points to the war being the best call on the information currently available.

What jury are we going by? It seems that much of the government has admitted to extremely poor intelligence on the matter. Also, you must prove a case for war with solid evidence. You can run around invading countries because you can't prove they don't have large weapon systems until you sieve every grain of sand.

LMFAO. I read that and a switch went off. I know that kid.
Last year I did some development on a website whose owner spoke often of going to Defcon in Vegas. He also spoke of Anarchy, and causing Civil Disobedience at the Democratic convention. It didn't take me long to figure out he was using his site not to teach admins how to spot vulnerabilities in their web code, but to spread his own political agenda, and gather a willing army of script kiddies.

Needless to say our beliefs on hacking weren't the same. Whoever this person was at Defcon, he is an embarassment to the hacking community, both whitehats and blackhats.

I stopped in on the sites IRC server to see what was up with some old friends, turns out this guy has a court date not too far off something about striking a police officer.

I would bet it's the same guy.

His politics, and genuine lack of interest in teaching admins the skills necessary to find and fix flaws in thier code is why I left.

I'm all for hacking code, but the art would be better suited to securing systems and spreading the knowledge of how to secure, instead of teaching an army of script kiddies to be a leet hax0rz.